I’ve seen too many lazy pie charts and thermometers, even thought it’s fairly simple and easy to create a minimalist progress donut. Here’s a basic version that I like enough to use over and over again.

Here is the Seahawks Stat-Deck for Week 3. You can see how the defense shut Peyton down through the first three quarters. The offense had three awesome drives, including the 13-play winning strike in overtime. Hit the jump to monolyst.com for the full deck. Next up: bye-week.

The World Health Organization has announced a roadmap to stop the transmission of the Ebola virus within 6 to 9 months and that more than 20,000 people could be infected before it is brought under control. The latest update reports over 3,000 cases and 1,500 deaths. We have updated the Ebola time series for to show that the outbreak is still accelerating and the majority of cases have occurred within the last three weeks. We will continue to plot new data as it becomes available and provide a weekly time series update.

The number of Ebola deaths reached 1,200 this week. There are one million people living in the quarantine zones in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone. Is the outbreak getting progressively worse? Using updates from the World Health Organization, I created a time series for a seven-week period. The chart suggests that the number of cases in the last few weeks has definitely increased compared to July, but it doesn’t look like exponential grown for the displayed time period. We will continue to plot new data as it becomes available and update this chart next week.

Geekwire has posted the upcoming, proposed bike share locations in Seattle. The bike share is managed by Alta Bicycle Share (Portland), which designs, deploys and manages similar programs across the world. In Seattle the bike share will run $85 for an annual pass and $8 for a 24-hour pass. These seem like very reasonable rates that will allow many of us to live without personally owned vehicles. But, how does this compare to other cities? We created a simple Excel bar chart to compare the 24-hour rental cost in New York and Melbourne referenced in a feature about Mia Birk, the Bike Share Expert (Monocole 75, page 68).

$2.50 AUD ($2.33 USD) in Melbourne is almost off the charts! Go to Australia, travel all day for less than the price of a Top Pot doughnut.

The July/August issue of Monocle Magazine lists the top 25 most livable Cities in 2013. Copenhagen has moved up to two places to number one, followed by Tokyo, Melbourne, Stockholm, and Helsinki. Seattle doesn’t make the list and is outranked by Vancouver, B.C (15) and Portland (22). One indicator of livability is the Chain Test, a comparison of the number of McDonalds and the number of H&M. We created a simple bar chart in Excel using Monolyst principles to see what this looks like for the top five cities. Share this page if you think Tokyo and Melbourne have to many McD’s.